We had a discussion about it in Beta discussion for the Furry Teens website that's being developed, but I guess not everybody has access to it. I'm not really good at elaborating the technical side of how the site functions so I'll defer to Natasha.

I'll give my reasons for not doing it, to start, and y'all are welcome to discuss it.

First off, a shoutbox is spammy to the point of being useless. It serves no purpose other than creating noise, and noise is not a good thing to have. If any real conversation DOES occur there, it's by accident, and fades away into the noise too easily.

Second, it takes activity away from the forum, when the entire point of this project is to design better forums, and put the emphasis there. We're not building a social networking site, or a chatroom.

And third, a shoutbox is a poorly-conceived feature with no good technical implementation. It's not a chatroom, or message board, or instant messenger, but a hodge-podge of all three, and isn't really good at any of them. Plus, they're a mess to try to build, hence why all the pre-made ones, even the "best", are kludgy, bloated, slow-to-load monstrosities.

Which brings us to the last point: A shoutbox consumes more resources than the entire rest of the site combined, while contributing nothing to the user experience. It is, at best, a casual toy, something to fiddle with while visiting the site, which may occasionally see a conversation here and there, but mostly serves as a crap collector for random gibberish. But, there's no efficient way to create one, so it's a crap-collector that puts more strain on the server than everything else on the site. Combined.

In short, it costs more resources than its ultimately worth and it doesn't contribute much to the service that the site provides. You're still welcome to support it but you'll find that I'm not too fond of the idea. There's many awesome social features that can greatly improve the site, but this isn't one of them.

I am disappointed, especially since there has been so many genuine replies indicating how fun a shoutbox could be. I already run one in my own forum and it has never attracted spammers, time wasters and advertising other forums etc etc is not permitted, therefore my members respect that.

Actually, I agree with not having the shoutbox. I know this is biased but I view FT most of the time with my mobile and it takes an average of 5 seconds to load a page without any pictures. If there ARE pictures, it'll take 5 minutes to load one. And at that point my phone gets really laggy already. I also agree with Natasha's point of the shoutbox costing more than it's worth. Sure it'll be cool for awhile. Until people abuse it without end. Then the spammers will come and SHTF